Saturday, April 04, 2009

The Globe and Mail should be ashamed of itself

Oooh, that Barak -- sooo scary!!!
The Globe and Mail should be ashamed of itself, putting John Ibbitson's ridiculous, ideological smear job against Obama on its front page -- illustrated with hammers and sickles, no less.
Wanna-be Villager Ibbitson lashes about with all sorts of labels -- socialist, interventionist, activist -- but nothing sticks.
He quotes those models of balanced bipartisanship like Mike Huckabee and the Hudson Institute and the National Review, all in service of his premise that Obama shouldn't be trying to change America.
He also rewrites history to conform to his storyline:
The best and the brightest is how author David Halberstam dubbed those who advised Mr. Johnson and John F. Kennedy before him. They believed they could win the war in Vietnam while reshaping health care, education, housing and civil rights —the Great Society, it was called.
But they didn't know what they didn't know, as former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld liked to say. They failed to appreciate the complexity of the issues, and they paid the price in quagmires.
Is Mr. Obama leading us into a domestic Vietnam? Is the ambition and complexity of his agenda bound to overwhelm an administration that has taken on more than any White House could possibly handle?
Actually, this is wrong -- Johnson's Great Society did not fail at all, in fact much of what he did is still benefiting America -- the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, federal funding for education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, PBS, urban renewal.
Where he failed was with Vietnam, but that failure was so massive that it overshadowed Johnson's successes.
Ibbitson does at least talk to Howard Dean, who derides the premise that Obama is doing too much:
"I hate to ruin your article, but I think that's a ludicrous proposal."
That about sums it up, John.

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